Hashed my iMac g4

Bad news first: I used Migration Assistant from an Intel iMac running Snow Leopard to a G4 iMac running Leopard. In the process I seem to have overwritten lots of programs with incompatible Intel versions. Among the wreckage: System Preferences fails to open, so I gather I've made quite a mess (though if I choose "About this Mac" from the Apple menu and "More info" from there the System Profiler does show me the Contents of my Mac).

[Yes, I'm migrating in retrograde; I love the looks of the G4 and got one for a song on eBay...I'm hopeful that this elegant machine can be a decent home computer beyond its upcoming tenth birthday.]

Good news, I hope, is that the G4 has a "Rescue" partition with a clean copy of Snow Leopard. I'd like, if at all possible, to boot from that partition, wipe the main partition, and re-clone "Rescue" in case I find trouble again sometime. Unfortunately, this is all a bit over my head and I'll need someone to step me through it... How do I boot from a different partition, and how do I get rid of the mess I've made of the main partition?

Snow Leopard will not run on a G4 as it is only for Intel machines. Go out into the market place and purchase a full retail DVD version of either Tiger OS X.4, or Leopard OS X.5 if the G4 is over and above the 867MHz processor limit.

Boot from the DVD, erase the drive by zeroing, and do a clean install. No rescue or recovery discs just the retail install DVDs which are gonna set you back perhaps over the $100 mark. Do not buy a silver/grey model specific DVD.

Hang on to those original install discs like grim death! Using OS X.7 or later make a bootable USB thumb drive before running Installer!

Thanks for the info, but perhaps I wasn't clear: the G4 came with Leopard, and I only intended to move my data from the Intel Mac running Snow Leopard. I wasn't trying to upgrade the OS, nor did I (Leopard still limps along on the G4).

I'm trying to recover proper use of Leopard on the G4 by re-starting from the "recover" partition that came with the G4; I've just never done this and a couple of Google searches didn't get me to anything promising.

This one did. No disks, though. It's right there on my desktop, beside the OS X one from which the machine currently boots (and runs, with a limp). It was put there as part of a clean install by the eBay seller specifically in case I ran into trouble, and I'm there.

I have no idea what it took to put it there; my question is how to boot from it and how to clone it as a hedge against future mischief?

Here is another way if it's a true bootable recovery partition. Right when you hear the Startup sound, hold down the OPTION Key. Do you have an Apple Keyboard? Hold it down and see if a boot menu comes up. If so select that recover partition and the arrow. It should boot from it. Otherwise not sure that that ebay seller did.

Yes, this worked! It booted from the "Recover" partition to a clean start, and everything works again. The "Rescue" hard drive symbol now is located above the OS X hard drive symbol on my desktop, I suppose indicating which I'm working from.

So it would seem I'm halfway there, more or less: I'm back in charge of my iMac. Now how do I delete the other partition and clone the Rescue partition as insurance agains future troubles?